We had left off last time looking at teleology. This is an area that is hotly contested within biology because the central dogma is that biology is purposeless. This seems very strange in light of the fact that many processes within biology seem to be goal oriented.

Considering the universe from a wider perspective, there has arisen the concept that teleology is not something foreign to the operations of the world. This has been underlined by the Anthropic Principle which shows that this universe was not an accidental occurrence but something ordered and brought into being by a Supreme Mind. In light of the Anthropic Principle it has become difficult to challenge the fact that the universe seems to be ordained in such a way as to produce thinking and rational beings by claiming that it is all a coincidental chance occurrence.

This has been a challenge thrown out to the atheists, and they have tried to bypass the fine tuning of the universe by postulating the existence of an infinite number of universes and it just so happened that the laws in the universe we occupy allow sentient and conscious beings to come into existence. All this somehow smacks of desperation.

But the underlying question before scientists is – how did life originate, how did inert matter produce thinking entities? And what is just as problematic, living entities who are capable of reproducing and spreading life on the surface of our planet.

Just a few words of what the word ‘life’ means. Something that is alive, will also be teleological which means that it will possess goals and purposes. It was Aristotle who defined life in teleological terms and it is ironic that modern biology sees teleology as an anathema and yet we are forced to go back to teleology in order to study the origins of life.

Most theories of biogenesis – how life arose – focus on the chemistry of life but life is more than just complex chemical reactions. The cell, as we have seen in previous letters, is a complex information storage and processing body. We need to explain how this information arose in the first place.

Importantly, genetic information does not arise from thermodynamics or statistical mechanics. The information in cells is to a large extent independent of chemical processes such as hydrogen bonding. It is semantic information. The instructions in cells can be effective only in a molecular environment capable of interpreting the meaning of the genetic code. Take the DNA out of a cell and it is an inert molecule incapable of doing anything except to look like a strand of nylon. So, you see, the problem can be framed as to how semantic information can emerge spontaneously from a collection of mindless molecules subject to blind and purposeless forces.

How can we account for the existence of life in our world? George Wald (Nobel Prize winner in physiology) has argued in the past that we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance. In later life, he changed his views.

‘How is it that, with so many options, we are in a universe that possesses just that peculiar nexus of properties that breeds life?’ Wald asks. ‘It has occurred to me lately – I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities – to conclude the following: Mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has always existed as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality – that the stuff of which physical reality is constructed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life, and eventually evolves creatures that know and create.’

The only satisfactory explanation – atheists notwithstanding – for the origin of such end-directed, self-replicating life as we see on earth is an infinitely intelligent Mind. And this is a conclusion arrived at not by theologians but by scientists who study the behavior of the world that we inhabit.

In an interview soon after the publication of A Brief History of Time, Hawking acknowledged that his proposed model for the beginning of the universe had no bearing on the question of God’s existence. He continues to say that the laws of physics determined how the universe began – through them we are only saying that God did not choose to set the universe going in some arbitrary way that we couldn’t understand. It says nothing about whether God exists or not – just that He is not arbitrary. Atheists gleefully latched onto Hawking’s book as if it proved that God was superfluous in the universe coming into being, but as we see, this is far from what was stated by Hawking.

We live in a privileged time because empirical science has opened up new avenues for understanding the world. Of particular importance were the discoveries in genetics and the workings of the neuronal system in the brain. Science enables us to better understand the physical operations of these systems but it runs into a blockage when it comes to describing the origination of these systems. Granted, there are neuronal processes that accompany my thinking but they cannot touch or validate my thoughts. These lie outside the physical domain of the neuronal architecture of my brain.

Your ability to reason and to have rational thought is real as you can vouch through your own experiences. Your thoughts have meaning and this very idea of meaning is beyond the physical apparatus – words and neurons which are used in executing your thoughts do not and cannot convey the meaning of your thoughts. We often conflate these two processes – the brain and the mind – ignoring the fact that thinking is not defined by brain activity but lies outside of it, as was pointed out in previous letters.

One of the things that has muddied our understanding in this area is that we have come to think of computer operations as essentially the same as that of our brains. Interestingly, if we go back to the time of the Industrial Revolution the models used for explaining thinking and other processes in the body involved pumps and other mechanical devices that were in vogue at the time. Now we use computers as our models for explanations.

This machine we call a computer performs calculations and mainframe transactions in response to data and instructions in the form of electrical pulses, circuitry, and transistors. The same calculations performed by a human will involve the machinery of the brain but it is performed by a center of consciousness who is conscious of what he is doing and intentionally performs its actions. There is no awareness, understanding, meaning, intention or person involved when the computer performs its action. The output of the computer has meaning for us but not for the computer itself.

We are living entities whereas computers and other machines are not. We are teleological in that we set and strive to achieve certain goals. Computers do not. And we are conscious agents. We, in a summary are persons and this is something that atheists have tried to deny.

This reminds me of one of those apocryphal stories where a student challenged a professor with the question: How do I know I exist? Whereupon the professor replied: And who’s asking?

Atheists deny the most fundamental properties of personhood and consciousness and yet employ these very same properties in their arguments. Dawkins for example, imputes the properties of personhood to genes.

The question of the origin of life has not been solved on a strictly materialistic basis and there are no promising avenues that may lead to a satisfactory answer. In a sense, those seeking to find a purely materialistic basis for life, for thinking, for consciousness are barking up the wrong tree. The answer is staring them in the face but they do not want to let go of their materialistic moorings and they continue to fail. The desperation of this effort is seen in the proposal of multiple universes and in other attempts to deny the Big Bang theory, which is seen as being too theologically ‘friendly’. This desperation also comes out in the obfuscation that out of nothing comes something. It is surprising how often this comes up.

This reminds me of a story of a ‘scientist’ caught up in his hubris challenging God. He says to God: I can do whatever you can. God asks: can you create life? The scientist replies: Of course. Let me start off with some clay… And God stops him right there: Don’t use my clay – make your own clay.

This is a good illustration of where the origin of life studies are at present.

But, hovering over all of this is the central but unanswered question that materialists ignore or try to avoid. Why is there anything at all? And it is only theism that offers a credible and satisfactory answer to this question.

The arguments we have reviewed make the belief in God’s existence credible but we need to go further. We need to know more about what God is like and what His relationship to creation is. In order to do that, we have to go beyond rational arguments and touch on Revelation to get information that is deeper and more meaningful for us about God.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas